Britain would be "mad, literally mad" to abandon them to Amin's whim, he said - and then he coined the emotive phrase for which we will always remember him: "Like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood."

Johnson borrows something of his technique from Harrison, a device I would call emotive exposition, which lends declarative statements of fact a certain kind of dramatic force, and harks back to the work of Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson.